Thank you for your kind reply!
I have a curiosity that is eating me alive, may I ask you what is the "true" nature of the hitchhiker? From my understanding, it is a sort of entity that feeds on the souls of suffering people, much like a Lovecraftian entity that can disguise in a human form. My theory is that the VHS shop owner, through his deranged actions, "summoned" the being, who escaped his dimension through the VHS medium and possessed the human, who then left his work (and his identity card) and trapped the whole town in the endless prison, thus blackmailing the inhabitants to obtain new souls through the ritual killings immortalized by the tapes. Am I just overthinking it?